


shine a light

by honey_wheeler



Series: home is just another word for you [2]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Group Marriage, Multi, Threesome - F/F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-19
Updated: 2012-04-19
Packaged: 2017-11-03 22:08:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/386506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honey_wheeler/pseuds/honey_wheeler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It reminds him of being with his brothers and sisters when they were children – with Sansa herself, before she insisted on sleeping on her own, something Jon always thought was because of his presence – all of them sharing a bed, piled on one another to sleep. But this is nothing so innocent. There’s an undercurrent here, a delicate awareness. It charges the space between the three of them and makes it crackle like the air before a storm, makes Jon’s nerves sing like a mockingbird.</p>
            </blockquote>





	shine a light

**Author's Note:**

> From the prompt: _Jon/Jeyne W./Sansa, Jon and Jeyne are married and Sansa comes to live with them._ Future fic, vague spoilers through ADwD, specific spoilers through ASoS. R+L=J. Loose continuation of **[we keep you in our bones](http://archiveofourown.org/works/370459)**.

It’s Jeyne’s idea. 

Jon would have carried on, tormented and torn, fighting himself, his honor, his desire. Jeyne’s far more sensible than he, the turning of years bringing out a practicality in her, one rather different from the girl he’d first met and wed, a girl who’d still mourned the loss of dreams, who’d still cried over the death of the husband she’d loved. But Jon had still cried over Robb’s death as well, so it made them a sensible pair. And Winterfell has a way of driving out everything but the necessary, of stripping things down to the skin. Jon asks, sometimes, if she doesn’t miss her old life, her old self. “No sense in lamenting the past,” she says, and it’s true, but underneath such practical thoughts, Jon thinks that perhaps she’s happy.

They’d been wed only a handful of years when Sansa had come to them, dressed in the skin of a bastard girl of the Vale. Jon had thought of her, often, so very often, but nothing could have prepared him for the sight of her, for her presence there in the courtyard they’d shared so long ago as children. He’d looked at her and for the first time felt a shock of kinship with her, an irony both painful and comic given Jon’s recent discovery that he wasn’t her brother after all but a Targaryen bastard, a cousin to those he’d always known as siblings. Her face had been closed off, reserved, but Jon was no stranger to suffering; there was no hiding from him the uncertainty in her eyes, the wounded wariness, the defiance – a defiance that fled when he impulsively embraced her and held her, one hand in her hair, pressing her now-crying eyes against his shoulder. The hair was bastard brown instead of Tully red then, but he knew the red was hidden beneath still, just as Sansa was, and he rubbed it with his fingertips until her crying faded and stilled.

She’s been with them long enough for her presence to feel familiar, for the Sansa Jon knew to shine through the cracks in Alayne Stone’s façade. The brown retreats from the red, receding to the ends as her hair grows long and shining once more, until the day it’s gone entirely and Jon can scarcely breathe from seeing her standing there before him, only Sansa. She was always a pretty child, but she’s beautiful now, all the lovelier for her strength and tenacity in the face of hardship. Jon often finds himself reaching out to touch the fall of her hair, to soothe some hidden ache or lingering unhappiness that only the mildest movement betrays – the tremble of her hand, the quick downward twist of her mouth – but he always stops himself, pulls back his hand as he pulls back his unruly emotions. Sometimes he wants to touch her in ways that have nothing to do with soothing. Jeyne is his wife, and Jon has been something close to happy, but still something in Sansa makes him want in a way that frightens him.

She’s his sister and she’s not, and he has no idea what to do with any of it.

“She’s lonely,” Jeyne tells him when they lie together at night, the crown of her hair nestled under his chin, her hand tracing absent patterns on his ribs. She and Sansa have become fast friends, in a way that Jon finds surprising until he remembers his first year on the Wall, how quickly Sam had become a true brother to him. How the hottest fires always forge the strongest steel. “She needs you.” Jeyne has seen Jon reach out to Sansa and falter, has seen – or so she claims – the flicker of disappointment in Sansa’s eyes when he keeps himself away from her, the yearning in the way she holds herself. Such ideas only confuse Jon more. Jeyne doesn’t know what she suggests, he thinks, doesn’t know what Jon might do if he allowed himself to touch Sansa, to breach the invisible barrier between them. But then maybe she does. Jeyne looks at him so knowingly, with a familiarity born of years together, sharing a home and a life and a bed, and Jon wonders if he’ll ever have a secret from her again.

He suspects the wine was her idea. It’s far stronger than anything they usually have, and Jon finds himself dizzy with it in a way he hasn’t been since he was a green boy only trying drink for the first time, when he and Robb would steal wineskins and wake the next morning in the armory or the stables with missing memories and mysterious bruises and tremendous headaches, before they grew accustomed to the potency of it. Sansa looks to be feeling the effects as well; her eyes are bright, pink flags stand out on her pale cheeks. Jeyne is nowhere to be found. Jon curses, leading Sansa to raise her eyebrows in question.

“My wife is a meddler,” he tells her, his tongue far too loose for his liking.

“Oh, she is lovely,” Sansa says. “She’s been so good to me. You’ve both been so very kind.” She stops and takes a swallow of air, a hundred emotions flitting across the surface of her face like ripples on a pond. She’s become so skilled at holding back, hiding herself under a placid shell, that it’s a shock to see the emotions plain on her face, and it makes her look younger, far more vulnerable. “I’ve been lucky,” she continues, her words tumbling from her in a rush, as if she’s afraid she shouldn’t say them but finds she must. “I’ve been lucky to have so many people to help me and hide me. Really, I’ve been so very lucky, even if I never felt safe before now, even if…” Her words dry up. Jon can see her throat working, can see the tense set of her body, and he itches to hold her, to protect her from anything or anyone that might harm her. Then she takes a hitching gulp of breath, struggling for composure even as her eyes well with tears, and Jon’s heart cracks neatly in half. “You will never know how grateful I am for your kindness.”

“Sansa,” Jon says, pained. “It has nothing to do with kindness. You’re kin. You’re our family. This is your home and you belong here, more than any of us. You must know that.”

She nods, biting her lip, the tears trembling unshed in her eyes. She offers him a tremulous smile and blinks, a fat tear coursing down her cheek afterward, and Jon is undone. He reaches for her, allows his hands to do what they’ve longed to since he released her from his embrace the day she arrived and didn’t touch her again.

“Sansa,” he says, his voice raw and choked with too much feeling. “Sweetling, it’s all right. You’re safe with us.” And maybe Jeyne was right, because Sansa clings to him with a fierceness that surprises him, her arms around his ribs, her face buried against his chest. She’s so tall that she fits perfectly under his chin. Her hair is soft on his lips as he kisses her crown, her temple, the red of it shining in the firelight, Sansa’s red hair, Sansa who is his sister no more but has become true family, who has suffered so before making it home.

She falls asleep on his lap, curled trustingly against him in the armchair nearest the fire. One pale hand is fisted in the front of his shirt, even in sleep, as if to keep him there. Jon has no thought of moving away, maybe never again. He wraps a shining length of hair about his hand, turns it twice around and makes a fist, his thumb rubbing over the cool silk of it. Every time she moves in her sleep, shifts against him and sighs out against his neck, his blood surges, until he’s hard as an anvil under the sweet weight of her, but still he feels relaxed, boneless. Like he could drift off to sleep right here, if he let himself. Instead, he shifts her carefully against his shoulder and pushes to his feet, catching her knees over his elbow, easily hefting her slight weight, too slight a weight for how tall she is. He’s tired, still slow and muzzy from wine. That’s the only reason he can form for why his feet carry her not to her own chambers, but to his and Jeyne’s. But even if he were clear-headed, he thinks he would bring her here. She shouldn’t wake up alone.

Jeyne shows no surprise when he shoulders the door to their bedchamber open, carefully guiding Sansa’s head and toes through the frame. She only throws the sleeping furs back, rises from the bed to help him remove Sansa’s slippers and gown. Together they settle her in the center of the mattress, the shallow rise and fall of her breathing strangely soothing and reassuring to Jon. He ghosts one hand over the slope of her chest, over the ribbons closing the throat of her shift, wanting to feel her breathing and the beating of her heart, but pulls away without touching her. Jeyne only watches him. He scrubs a hand over his face. This is far too much confusion on so much wine.

“I don’t know whether to yell at you,” he tells Jeyne, “or spank you or…or…”

“Or?” she prompts.

“Or kiss you,” Jon admits. She smiles at that. Then she climbs into bed at Sansa’s side and Jon does the same. He listens to the sounds of their mingled breathing, feels the mattress shift whenever either one moves, and it’s so right that he wonders why he was ever confused.

*****

Jon's not sure how he’s missed everything changing. But then, he supposes it’s the sort of thing that's only obvious afterward, something that happens in such tiny pieces and increments that you can't see it until it's done. Touches grow more familiar, more intimate. Kisses on cheeks become kisses on lips, chaste still but changed nonetheless. Sansa and Jeyne are rarely far apart, looping their arms together, sitting on the hearth to brush each other’s hair dry, a thousand small intimacies between them. Sansa is more hesitant with Jon, more tentative, but that only makes it all the more powerful when she catches his hand in hers and squeezes or brushes the unruly cloud of his hair from his face, when she rests her head against his knee as they sit before the fire. When she curls against him in the night, so trusting it takes Jon’s breath away. She’d slept in their bed more often than not after that first night, until now she never returns to her own bedchambers, without question or comment from any of them, and it’s just how things are.

It reminds him of being with his brothers and sisters when they were children – with Sansa herself, before she insisted on sleeping on her own, something Jon always thought was because of his presence – all of them sharing a bed, piled on one another to sleep. But this is nothing so innocent. There’s an undercurrent here, a delicate awareness. It charges the space between the three of them and makes it crackle like the air before a storm, makes Jon’s nerves sing like a mockingbird. He jumps at the slightest touch, walks about perpetually aroused, sometimes wearing his heavy leather jerkin even inside to maintain some shred of dignity and decency. Jeyne’s eyes miss nothing. He gets the feeling she finds it funny. He also gets the feeling that she’s up to something and he’s not sure whether to dread or anticipate it.

It’s the wine that really gets him into trouble again. Jon should have thrown the last of it away before. Praise to gods old and new that he didn’t. Sansa and Jeyne have had more than their fair share and they’re giggling now, leaning against each other, teasing Jon and laughing at him. He hasn’t heard Sansa laugh like this in years, not since she was a little girl, before the circumstances of his birth drove an invisible wedge between them. And he’s never heard Jeyne like this; he thinks it maybe how Robb knew her, young and sweet and spirited. Jeyne looks at him now, combing absent fingers through Sansa’s hair as she braids it for the night, taking in the way Jon’s eyes go dark and glassy as he watches them, his thoughts hot and illicit enough to make him ache. She cocks one brow at him and delicately – deliberately – traces a finger along Sansa’s collarbone with a feather-light touch that makes Sansa shiver. Jon stifles a groan and crosses his legs, ignoring how Jeyne smiles, pleased, as if she’s just discovered a secret.

"Jon,” she orders from her spot on the hearthstones once she's fixed the tail of Sansa's braid with a bit of blue ribbon. “Help us up." She holds out an imperious hand. It takes a moment before Jon thinks he can stand without scandalizing poor Sansa, but nonetheless he rises, dutifully pulls Jeyne up, hesitating a bare moment before giving his hand to Sansa. The effect of his skin touching hers is more potent than he'd imagined. It sets loose a current of lightning racing under his skin, crackling through the marrow of his bones, one that only worsens when she stumbles from wine and clings to his elbow, her breasts pressing soft and exquisite into his ribs. He jerks at the feel of her – gods, she feels so good – so sharply that wine slops from his glass to splash over his hand and wrist, dots of dark red sucked greedily into the fabric of Sansa’s gown. Jeyne’s laugh rings out bright and pleased.

“Jon, really, you’re more tightly-strung than a harp.” She takes the glass from him and sets it aside, slides an easy arm around his waist and nips at his collarbone. “If I pluck you, will you sing for me?” 

She's warm on one side of him, Sansa on the other, still clinging to his arm for balance. For a moment, for just one painfully perfect moment, Jon lets himself surrender to their presence, poised perfectly between longing and belonging. He expects one or both of them to move away, for this little cocoon they're in to burst open, but Jeyne takes up his hand, rubs her thumb over his palm in a soothing motion before closing her lips around his index finger to suck at the wine on his skin in a hot, wet pull that shoots straight to his groin.

“Jeyne,” he breathes, his other hand settling at her nape, tugging on her hair with the gentle pressure she likes best. He should control himself, he knows, be mindful Sansa’s presence – as if he could forget, as if his every cell in his body doesn’t seem attuned to her like she’s the pole star and he’s the constellations that wheel around her – but Jeyne’s touch is devastating in its casual intimacy, so comfortable even as it fires his senses. It's something’s he’s missed with Sansa sharing their bed chastely, his wife's touch – the wife he'd never thought to have, but now couldn't imagine life without – and he's humming with wine and need, a deep rumble of pleasure sounding in his chest. Jeyne’s mouth is deft, unerring; delicately, she licks his thumb clean, her tongue on the web of his hand scrambling Jon's mind like a breakfast egg. It's been too long, gods, he needs her touch like air.

Sansa shifts and colors at his side, a pink flush staining her checks and neck. Jon thinks with a pang that she must be uncomfortable. He opens his mouth to apologize but he’s brought up short by what he sees on her face, a kind of longing he remembers all too well, envy of the closeness of others, of their easy intimacy. And Jon can't seem to remember how to let go; he keeps her hands pinned between elbow and ribs, holding her to his side. He should let her go. He should. But still he doesn’t release her and he doesn’t think it’s just his wishful thinking that she doesn’t seem to even try to move away. Jeyne must see the same, for she doesn’t stop or step away, but instead holds Jon’s hand to Sansa’s lips, wine still scattered in droplets on his skin. When Jon realizes her intent, something hot and heavy expands in his chest and it’s all he can do to breathe.

“Jeyne,” he says, warningly, even though his voice is so ragged it carries little threat. She shoots him a quelling look. Helplessly, he appeals to Sansa, but to his intense surprise – and maybe even to her own – she leans in to close her lips about his middle finger, sweeping the liquid from his skin with the curl of her tongue. 

The sound Jon makes is nothing close to a word, much to his embarrassment. His hand fists convulsively in Jeyne’s hair. Sansa’s tongue flicks his fingertip when she retreats, and she blushes, peeking up at him with nerves written plain on her face, nerves and longing and a certain thrill at her own daring, before the heat of her mouth surrounds his ring finger and makes a slow slide from knuckle to tip. He clutches Jeyne’s hair so tightly he’s half afraid he might hurt her, leaving no doubt at the effect Sansa’s mouth is having, an effect that multiplies a hundred-fold when Jeyne leans forward and catches Sansa’s mouth with hers. Sansa’s fingers tighten on Jon’s wrist, her heart beating a wild tattoo on the back of his hand as she returns the kiss with a shy intensity that could reduce a man to ash. 

When Jeyne pulls back her lips are pink and smudged-looking and the expression on her face is clear. It’s Jon’s turn. Later, he might be ashamed at his lack of hesitation, at how readily he catches Sansa’s face in one hand, her chin pointed and delicate, cradled between his thumb and fingers, his blunt fingertips and bitten nails too ragged against her skin as they span her jaw from mouth to ear. But shame is nothing in light of her lips on his, of the taste of her, bright and sweet, sharp on his tongue when he teases the seam of her lips. He holds her like something precious and kisses her and kisses her and kisses her.

Maybe it’s the wine. Maybe it’s both of them, Jeyne and Sansa, the two people he loves best in the world, getting in his head and making it swim. Next time – oh, how presumptuous to think there will be a next time, but somehow, in his hidden heart, Jon knows that there will be, knows it with more certainty than he’s ever felt anything before – next time he’ll catalog each touch, pin each feeling in a frame for examination. But right now, everything exists only as an exquisite haze of sensations: the taste of Sansa in Jeyne’s mouth when he turns his kiss to her, the taste of her in Sansa's. Feathers puffing from the mattress as they land on it together like some many-limbed creature. The soft down of hair on Sansa’s arm. The music of Jeyne’s laughter, the catch of Sansa’s breath. The scatter of freckles on Jeyne’s dusky shoulders, Sansa’s milk-white skin a delicate contrast. Jeyne’s lively curls, the weight of Sansa’s braid, tethered by that scrap of ribbon almost as bright as the blue of her eyes. He loses track of whom he touches, where he presses his lips and delves his fingers. This is Sansa, he knows, under his tongue as he traces a wet line under the curve of her breast, smaller than Jeyne’s but no less sweet. It is Jeyne’s hip under his hand, lush and yielding, then her cunt around his fingers. Which of them holds his mouth with hers and which holds his cock he’s less sure of, but he doesn’t think there’s any point in caring when it feels this good, so fucking good.

"This is madness," he murmurs against soft skin, against warmth and satin. Someone’s mouth claims his. Jeyne’s. He’d know the taste of her anywhere.

"You're a Targaryen now," she says, lips at his ear, a serrated bite, a contented purr. "This is barely more than ordinary." He’d laugh, were he capable of it. Were she not teasing him to the brink of madness, were Sansa not shyly following her lead to test Jon’s other ear with blunt teeth and make him groan.

“Madness _is_ ordinary for Targaryens,” Sansa points out breathlessly, and Jon does laugh at that, so hard that he shakes, so big that there’s room for little else. 

***** 

The fire hisses softly into the hush of the room, collapsing slowly into glowing embers. It’s dark out yet, something that’s vaguely surprising to Jon. It seems impossible that night hasn’t even passed yet when it felt as though he’d been touching Jeyne and Sansa, inside them, learning every secret, for hours and days and years. He fights the urge to reconstruct every detail. Some other time, he will, but for now he likes how dreamlike it seems, like snatches of a forgotten conversation or an old memory grown dusty from disuse. 

They’re entwined before him now face to face, knees touching, Jeyne’s ankle thrown over Sansa’s calf, Sansa’s knuckles curled beneath Jeyne’s cheek. Jon slides the back of his hand down Sansa’s arm, traces the faint scars criss-crossing her back even as he frowns at them. She lies so trustingly against his wife. That she’s even capable of trust anymore is enough of a marvel. But then maybe he shouldn’t be surprised; Jeyne taught him long ago just how strong someone could be. Carefully, so as not to wake her, he tugs the ribbon from the braid that Jeyne wove into her hair. He unwinds the strands, slowly, letting Sansa’s coin-bright hair slip like water through his fingers to ripple over her scars, leaving her shining and beautiful and perfect before him. Strange how he could have been missing something so vital and never known until now.

A scratching at the door shakes him from his reverie: Ghost, impatient at being shut out of a space that used to be his and Jon’s alone, until he’d had to adjust first to Jeyne’s presence and now Sansa’s. Jon slides from the bed. It takes a moment to find his breeches. An image flashes in his mind, their fingers unlacing the placket together, Jeyne tugging down one leg and Sansa the other. And what they’d done once the breeches were thrown aside… A searing sweet ache burns in Jon’s belly at the memory, stirs him enough that lacing his breeches would be uncomfortable, so he doesn’t bother, only pulling them up to sit loose on his hips. Ghost noses through the heavy wooden door as soon as Jon’s tugged it open enough, bumping an affectionate head against Jon’s thigh. His fur is cold under Jon’s fingers and just a bit damp from snow.

“Poor old boy,” Jon murmurs. “I’ve been neglecting you.” He crouches next to Ghost before the fire and gives him a good scratch with both hands. Ghost leans into it, stretching into Jon’s brisk ministrations, knocking Jon back onto the floor with his sudden weight. Hard to imagine he was once small enough to be tucked into Jon’s jerkin. Hard to imagine he was once Jon’s only companion. Ghost moves away and shakes out his coat, done permitting Jon’s attentions. Then he trots to the bed and cocks his head at the two people already occupying it, looking back at Jon with an uncanny intelligence.

“Don’t you start with me,” Jon warns on a low laugh. Ghost makes a short sound, _brff_ , and jumps onto the bed, picking his way delicately to settle at Jeyne and Sansa’s feet. The great white bulk of him takes up almost every inch of space left on the mattress. He regards Jon with eyes that throb bright even in the gloom and then lowers his head to his paws, his contented sigh as massive as he is. It feels curiously like a validation. This is my family now, Jon thinks. Something fizzes up in his chest, something bright and sharp and perfect.

“Jon,” Jeyne calls, stirring and raising her head, looking around with sleepy eyes to find him. “Come back to bed.” Sansa yawns beside her, her tongue curling pink and delicate like a kitten’s, and makes a murmur of agreement. They watch him from the bed, the two of them – the three of them, really, Ghost having cracked an eye to look at him as well.

“We’re going to need a bigger bed,” he says. Then he laughs and takes a run at the bed like he’s a child again. Ghost makes a disgruntled sound as Jon’s weight jostles them all, the girls giggling as he forces himself between them and flops onto his stomach, saying, “Make way for the Lord of Winterfell.” 

“So full of himself,” Jeyne sighs. “We’ll have to show him who’s really in charge, won’t we Sansa?” Sansa laughs, a happy sound of agreement. Their hands slide over his back, Jeyne’s sure and constant, Sansa’s tentative and sweet. Jon buries his face in his crossed forearms, smiles so hard his face hurts. 

“I would perish under your tender hands and die happy,” he says fervently. Then he rolls to his back, catches Jeyne to his side in a practiced gesture. With his other hand, he slides a fingertip down the neat line of Sansa’s nose, holds her chin and presses his thumb to the well beneath her lower lip. “All right, dearheart?” he asks, a thousand meanings to the question, but only one right answer. Sansa nods, gives the shyest smile, and then buries her face against his shoulder to hide her blush. It’s the happiest he’s seen her since she came back to him. “All right,” he says, his voice like to crack with everything he’s feeling. “All right.” She settles against his side, she and Jeyne twin anchors holding him to the world. He holds on to them with both hands, stitches them into the tatters of him that remain to make something new, to make something whole and real, a roof to keep out the rain, a blanket big enough to cover the sky.


End file.
